Morning rituals are a thing for a lot of people. It is that part of the day that’s yours and yours alone. I am fortunate to be a morning person and guard this time of my day like a security guard would a vault full of diamonds. While there are many aspects of the morning time that I can spend hours sharing with you, today I would like to tell you a story about one such routine that I held for over a decade and a half and the mystery behind the ‘lost and found’ case.
The moment I stepped into college, and experienced a sense of general freedom in life (it was most natural to feel free after the dreaded class 10 board exams), one thing changed for me during the mornings. I carried the Bombay Times to the loo, first thing every morning and those few minutes set the tone for my day. I remember going to the door, seeing the fallen newspaper (that the newspaper wala would have thrown in as he scurried from one door to another), sift through the unwanted morose new carriers and find my beloved BT that would take me to a world that I found uplifting – what the bollywood stars were up to, latest trends in fashion, what the city was doing that summer, the best place to eat around town, home-made remedies for the common cold, a new art place in the vicinity, the movie that would release that Friday, best cardio workout regime and so on.
A few years passed. I graduated, found a job, started working for the ‘Times of India’. I couldn’t fathom for a few months that I actually worked for the company whose paper I read every day. A few more years passed, promotions, parties, new friendships, salary hikes, job moves, relationships; but the one constant through all of this was the morning routine – my rendezvous with my beloved BT.
One fine day, I realized that I did not enjoy reading the Bombay Times anymore. Came as a bit of a shock to me. It was probably because of the kind of career shift I had made. My job held more meaning now than before. I worked for people living with HIV. I somehow felt that what I read in the BT did not hold meaning in the backdrop of the ‘reality of life’ anymore. I needed more meaning. A few more days of reading the BT and I switched to its father, the ‘Times of India’. My father always told me ‘Beta, you need to read the newspaper every morning’ when I was growing up. But I couldn’t get myself to. Now I know why? When I thought I’d give it a shot, the ‘uplifting feeling’ each morning was replaced by something ‘not so uplifting’. By the grace of the almighty, within days, I realized that this regular morose daily news is not for me. As I flipped through the pages, I figured that once you pass the national news, city pages, politics…you arrive at the editorial page that was hmm…something worthwhile – shall I say soothing? I chanced upon the ‘Speaking Tree’ - my new morning read and it also held meaning. Two birds with one stone! The next few years dug up my spiritual side. It was these morning sessions with the speaking tree that began to unravel the latent spiritual side to me. Little did I realize that this new found ‘page’ in the Times of India would add a few meaningful pages to the book of life.
Cut to a few years later. I was in my mid-thirties, loved what life had brought to me so far; a consultancy I had founded, my own office, a team that I can swear by, work that I ensured made impact and changed lives of people for the better, parents that I had finally begun to dote upon, a new found relationship with my brother, a bunch of friends that were now mine through the seasons, a grounded and stable relationship with my partner that had stood the test of time, new found wisdom about life, my relationship with travel, my integrity and value system, the collection of books that I can call friends (my mom would be like ‘finally’), finding the calm to paint again, the sharp ability to introspect (Oh, the task of sitting with a sharpener each day), to have the courage to put it in words.
I had found all of this and more; little did I realize what I had lost until this morning. Yes, this morning! I went into the loo, with my phone (yes, times have changed; we read on our phone these days) and clicked on the section called ‘life’ on the huffpost blog. Why I did it, I do not know. As I was reading a very interesting article, it dawned upon me that this is an act that I had long forgotten. It took me in a flash to the years of struggle with this morning routine.
After almost 5 years went by reading the Speaking Tree, I was like a babe in the woods. While it was instrumental in shaping my thoughts and molded me in more ways than one, I came to a point where it felt repetitive. And one fine day, I had to give it up too. So here I was, one morning, with nothing to take with me to the loo, and felt - what can I say - ‘at a loss’. This was indeed a struggle. I would take a book sometimes, would go on social media, would look for youtube videos, but the lack of consistency made me uncomfortable. There was something soothing about not having to think of what to read during the wee hours of the morning. Now that I had to wake up each morning and wonder what to read was ‘no fun’. The discomfort got to me. I used to frantically search for content. What is it that could give me the ‘wowza’ content that I am longing for, consistently? I would search for it – would find it some days and not find it some other days. I would try and look for it the previous night, so I dint have to do the search in the morning, but that dint always work well. I missed the consistency of just waking up and starting to read.
They say, every journey of struggle is blessed with ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. The light in my case was a ray of sunshine. The quest to finding the ‘ideal morning read’ helped me traverse through so much content – books, videos, articles, etc. – that I stand before you with the skill to bring all that together for you, to put before you something that you can read every morning and experience exactly what I experienced. Losing ‘the morning read’ put me through a journey that made me create ‘the morning read’ for so many.
This is to say that ‘Every change is for a reason’, a reason that we may not understand. It took me years to ‘find what I had lost’ – but what I had found through the loss was way more than I could have asked for.
May you find what you are looking for or shall I say, ‘May you realize that what you did not know you were looking for, is seeking you’
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